We Can’t Go Back
A lot of people are asking “When can we go back?” When can we go back to restaurants, to schools, to synagogues, but also, when can we go back to the way things were before March 2020? The answer to many of the questions about returning to institutions relies a great deal on when people get vaccinated. I am delighted that everyone in Michigan over 16, and soon everyone over 12, is eligible for a vaccine and getting to vaccination sites is increasingly easy.
But the question of when we can go back to “the way things were” is, for me, the wrong question. We can’t go back, and we shouldn’t. Yes, we can and should go back to visiting in person with relatives and friends and going to theaters and hosting dinner parties in our homes. But after a time in which over 580,000 Americans have died, and millions of people have lost loved ones, or lost their jobs, or their homes, or the time in school that they deeply needed, it would be not just impossible but immoral to act as if we can simply bracket all of that and “go back” to the way things were.
We can only go forward.
We can go forward by allowing ourselves to mourn. We can go forward by recognizing that we need to care for our mental health and that of others. We can go forward by honoring the memories of those we lost when we live up to their highest ideals. We can go forward by really listening to one another, and listening carefully to the people who have struggled and suffered during this time. We can go forward by examining what structures and systems were unjust or inadequate in 2019 and how we can change them. We can go forward when we look at how some of the adjustments we made in the past year could actually serve us in the future.
I can’t wait for us to be together in person in the weeks and months to come. I am grateful that we will collectively be able to process what this past year has meant. And when we do, I hope that we don’t try to go back to how things were. Let us envision the future we want as together we go forward.