Rethinking what we think of as "disruption"

Here in my house, it's been a week since COVID-19 has placed us all at home 24/7. My husband and I have been working from home (although he did have to go into the office on Tuesday) and the kids' school closed and moved to online.

There have been high points and low points for sure. I helped my 11yo start Cardboard and Combos, a Magic The Gathering podcast. I've come off conference calls to find my 8yo having a digital pillow fight with his friend via FaceTime (he was throwing pillows at his iPad!) and he started writing a book.

There has also been bickering and fighting and screams and insults and times at which each member of our family has been pushed to the limits of our patience and beyond (although so far we've been taking turns at losing it).

We're all stressed out anyway. Suddenly having to figure out how to all live together ALL the time is no joke, and yet we also know we are in a very privileged position because, of course, Less Than a Third of American Workers Can Telework, and the Ones Who Can't Are Disproportionately Black and Latinx.

It's always about race in the US, no less so in a pandemic. The hardest hit will be the ones who have always been hardest hit, and yes, you could say it's about class, not race, but class and race are so intrinsically linked.

But for those of us who are working from home and have kids who are home too, this article on Traditional Indigenous Kinship Practices at Home: Being Child-Centered During the Pandemic gave me a very different perspective on the "suddenly homeschooling" challenges that some of us are facing.

It's actually one of the most helpful articles I've read over the past few weeks and it's been giving me life.

"The important thing to remember is that we must begin to find new ways to help raise our children that don’t require a reliance on colonial systems.

Because the real disruption occurred when we began to think that sending our children to school was the better choice in the first place, rather than having them with us, in the presence of our kinship systems, at all times."

There is such irony that, in the way colonialism and disease, brought here by white settlers, ravaged the indigenous communities in the US, we could consider that now capitalism and disease has in some ways put right the removal of children from families.

What if when it comes time to send our children back to school we no longer want to?!!!

Ironic given that just a couple of weeks ago, before all this was a reality, I was talking with a friend about how I just didn't think I was suited to homeschooling, even though, before I had kids, I had thought that I might.

We're about to find out.

Although, to be clear, we are not really what I would consider "homeschooling" right now. I’ve been overwhelmed by all the schedules and online classes and educational resources for "enrichment" springing up and my kids have absolutely not been interested. They are getting their school work done in the first hour of the day and really enjoying unstructured time. And as I said, new creative pursuits are emerging.

What if instead of trying to recreate our colonial, capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist and adult supremacist systems of work and school in our homes, we could do something different?

What if we could finally break out of our current but fast becoming at least temporarily untenable systems based on a "factory" model of capitalism that came out of the industrial revolution that has exacerbated disparities of wealth and power to the point where our systems and cultures across the globe are grinding to a halt?

What if we could shift the ways in which we have been socialized to think and behave, and adjust to having our kids around not as a disruption but as a re-integration?

How else could we re-integrate and heal ourselves, our families, our communities, our world?

What if we could create a society where every person was treated with value and dignity and not as a means for the profit and gain of a few?

What if things never go back to the way they were but could evolve to something better?

Things feel bleak right now. People are dying, more people will. NYC hospitals are starting to run out of ventilators and masks. Soon we will run out of beds. I saw a statistic comparing 924,000 hospital beds in the US to 2,300,000+ prison beds. We have made choices that the most marginalized will, as always, pay the highest price for.

I'm not here to paint a pretty picture. But I am here to call those of us who are able to dismantle the systems of oppression that are rapidly becoming more evident in their destruction.

Everything is already shifting and changing - how can we shift and change towards a more equitable and inclusive future that is better for all of us, and most especially for those most impacted on whom we rely?

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Banner photo by malith d karunarathne on Unsplash. Originally published on LinkedIn.