It’s been a while since you’ve heard from WM. No worries, though, because it’s been kind of a boring year, don’t you think?
Like many of you, I moved my office home in March and watched my daughter finish fifth grade at the kitchen table.
Campus closed, students went home, and life as we know it was up-ended. We scrambled to keep routines and set new paths for communicating and staying connected. COVID-19 forced us to re-evaluate every aspect of our lives.
In his virtual Chapel Talk in April, Associate Professor of Theater Jim Cherry said, “Plagues cause widespread suffering and death. They also tell us who we are.” He quoted French writer and director Antonin Artaud, who said the plague “causes the mask to fall, reveals the lie, the slackness, baseness, and hypocrisy of our world…”
In the past six months, I have made thousands of masks. I can’t help but think about the faces behind those masks: my husband’s, my daughter’s, my friends’, my parents’, my own.
Oh how many times I have figuratively put on a mask! I’m okay. I don’t need help.
What you are saying does not bother me. I am stronger than your words.
When the mask falls, this is the lie—the hypocrisy—of my own world.
But now the difference between life and death could very well be literally wearing a mask.
Cherry went on to say, “Crisis offers the opportunity to be the people we need to be. The person you imagine you would be in a crisis is you right now.”
I carried this Chapel Talk with me through the end of the spring semester as I started to imagine what this issue of WM might look like. Then, on Memorial Day, George Floyd was killed by police officers, giving new energy to social justice movements across the nation and around the world.
The challenge was desperate: Who do we need to be right now?
COVID-19 and systemic racism intertwined within a tumultuous election year. Each individually sows seeds of resentment, anxiety, division, blame. Collectively, it’s hard to turn on the news or have a conversation without being plunged into an icy bucket of despair and hopelessness for the nation and its people.
Regardless of where you stand on mask wearing or distancing or Black Lives Matter or defunding the police or herd immunity, as Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
We are all in this together, whether we like it or not.
One of the things i love about the Wabash community is the commitment to lifelong learning. Beyond biology, economics, or art, there is an openness and genuine interest in listening, learning, and moving forward with and for each other. For Wabash.
In the first days of his presidency at Wabash, Scott Feller encouraged us to adapt and grow in this moment of collective crisis with patience by showing compassion, being authentic, and being vulnerable.
I can promise you I will make mistakes. I can also promise you I am excited about the opportunity to listen, learn, and get better. As you read through these pages of Wabash Magazine, I challenge you to listen and learn with openness and genuine interest.
I’ll steal the closing from Professor Cherry’s Chapel Talk, because it’s worth hearing again.
“We are at the beginning now, with an ending that isn’t known. What we do know for sure is that our story is one we are all writing together. The connections between us, and between everyone, become so clear in this distanced, bemasked moment.
“Be reflective in what this all means, consider what we ought to become in the aftermath of this. Because all hands will be at the oars. Consider what we are learning now about our potential capacity for collective action.
Kim Johnson
Editor
johnsonk@wabash.edu
“When this all becomes too much—and it probably will for all of us—kindness will not fail.”