All This
There's a moment in the 2001 Michael Bay classic, Pearl Harbor (which Roger Ebert once described as "a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours"), in which Kate Beckinsale, having been reunited with Ben Affleck, is attempting to explain how she could possibly have abandoned him for Josh Hartnett. Ben, of course, had been reported to be dead, and Josh was hunky and sweet and there, so, you know. But a teary Kate says, and I quote: “I didn’t even know until the day you turned up alive — and then all this happened,” waving her hand vaguely over her shoulder at the still-smoking wreckage.
I have thought about this moment more times than I'd really like to admit over the intervening 24 years, but never more so than in the last four months. "We were already facing budgetary challenges in the college — and then all this happened" (waves hand vaguely over shoulder at the still-smoking wreckage). "I was worried about the future of this project -- and then all this happened." (You get the point.)
The all-this-ness of all this is utterly flippant, to be sure, but I'm beginning to understand the utility of all this as a container for the incomprehensible. We are facing circumstances that periodically cause me to lose my vocabulary. I don't know how to name it without breaking down, and I suspect that this is true of a lot of my colleagues. And so we talk about things like "the current moment" or "the federal funding landscape," ways of signaling what we all know -- that we are living through a fucking horror of our country's own making, the destruction of everything that matters to us, the kidnapping and torture of members of our communities, the completion of the descent into what it no longer makes sense to call anything other than fascism -- without landing our conversation in a place in which it becomes impossible to go on.
I am trying to reckon with all this, and with the desire to wave my hand vaguely over my shoulder without looking too closely at what it's gesturing toward. I have been doing a bit of writing around it, and am hoping that I'll be able to share some of that in the weeks and months ahead. I'm not sure where it's all headed, but it's at least an attempt to be honest with myself about my reactions to what's happening, as well as an expression of hope that we might find our way through together.
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