A trans student came late to lecture today and apologized to the TA afterward, it was just too hard to get up considering everything that's happening. The TA asked me what we can do for students like this beyond be available.
It's a question I've asked myself, too. My answer was to make sure that our classes are spaces not just of safety but places where students can be seen, heard, known and loved.
I worry a little that my classes this semester (all three of them!) seem to be unfolding as they would in any other semester, with readings and assignments and activities and discussions of issues not related to the present emergency. There are times I find it hard to get in the zone considering everything that's happening ... but then, once the class gathers, it feels like business as usual. To those already targeted by the wicked administration in Washington, does this make it seem like their existential peril doesn't matter? Some other students seem blithely unaware that we're experiencing a civilizational crisis.
I hope it's not rationalization to say that carrying on (as in "Keep calm and carry on") is a way of resisting the darkness, of refusing to abandon the forms of giving and relating, of inquiry and expression and creation, that everyone deserves to be part of, every one.
There's not been a class in which I haven't in one way or other indicated that things outside are not okay; I hope that's enough to signal solidarity and sanity, and that drawing our learning communities close to engage ideas and traditions and their meanings in human lives is a reminder of the way things should be and, one day, somehow, must once again be.
